AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA MOOC stands for Massive Online Open Courses. That is, it is a distance-learning course accessible through the internet that can be targeted by anyone and has practically no limit to the number of participants. A mass open online course (MOOC) is an online course designed for unlimited participation and open access through the web. In addition to the materials of a traditional course, such as videos, lectures and questionnaires, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for students, teachers and teaching assistants. Dave Cormier has made several videos describing what MOOCs are and how they work: CORMIER, Dave et al. What is a MOOC?
CORMIER, Dave et al. Success in a MOOC 2010
A Brief history David Wiley can be considered the author of the first conceptual MOOC, started at the University of Utah in August 2007. It was an open education course. This initiative continued in numerous projects promoted from different university centers inside and outside the United States. A milestone in the history of MOOCs dates back to autumn 2011 when more than 160,000 people enrolled in an artificial intelligence course offered by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig at the Stanford University through a Startup Called Know Labs (currently Udacity). Given the success and high enrollment, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng created Coursera. Based on a technology developed at Stanford, Coursera has become a platform supported by numerous prestigious universities (Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Penn). On the east coast, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched MITx in an effort to provide an open and free online education platform. Harvard soon joined this initiative, renamed Edx ,to which other Universities have been added, like Berkeley. Since then, many other platforms have emerged, such as FutureLearn or MirÃadaX, to cite some examples. The following picture shows the state of MOOCs in Europe in mid-2015 (Source: Open Education Europe - European Commission - Jul. 2015).